Will Cygan

Small lookups across billions of rows

Committing changes across multiple shards

Spreading cluster state through peer-to-peer exchange

Independent updates that converge without coordination

Moving data between replicas

Exploring suspicion when messages stop arriving

Choosing a leader when heartbeats stop

Following keys into ordered logs

Reusing database connections to cut latency and resource cost

Repairing bad data with scheduled jobs

Using the OpenRouter Batch API to save money, and the openrouter-batch crate to do it from Rust

When service calls multiply downstream

A practical guide to model-driven APIs

How repeated lookups become an N+1 query problem

How to split data and choose shard keys

Routing, consistency, and failover across multiple regions

Using voice input to work with software

How long-running work survives failures

Preventing lost updates with version guards

How databases commit before flushing every data page

Tracing a Postgres update through a CDC pipeline

Embedding OpenStreetMap in a static blog post

Building ASCII animations for the web

Power tools I rely on

Embedding Mermaid diagrams on the web

Building a Kubernetes cluster in my basement